


Intermediate Evasion of Popular Narrative Devices

by catefrankie



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode: s05e11 G.I. Jeff, F/M, Jealousy, Makeover, Matchmaking, Miscommunication, and post-canon, everyone can see it, knight in shining armor, primarily season 5
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:48:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25133392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catefrankie/pseuds/catefrankie
Summary: “Annie, we’re in our fifth season.  Obviously I appreciate that we can fall back on your unresolved tension whenever we’re low on fodder for the plot, but there’s a reverse danger to the moonlighting curse such that if we wait too long, then the expectations keep climbing beyond the point of ever being able to satisfy them.  Now is the perfect time to move forward.  You just need a little narrative push.”Abed attempts to maneuver Annie and Jeff into a relationship via tried-and-true romantic tropes.  Annie tries to evade him.
Relationships: Annie Edison & Abed Nadir, Annie Edison/Jeff Winger
Comments: 154
Kudos: 214





	1. MAKEOVER

_we never go out of style_

Abed starts playing puppet-master almost immediately after they re-enroll at Greendale.

The sensation is familiar enough, being nudged and managed in a manner that’s about as subtle as a rock, but in a direction that makes no sense to anyone who doesn’t have Abed’s very specific priorities. He takes an out-of-character interest in finagling their seating arrangements in the cafeteria, delivers a few odd one-liners that leave them all staring perplexedly, and he seems like he’s checking for Annie’s specific reaction more often than he had previously, but it’s not causing any harm. Annie makes a mental note that he’s definitely trying to exercise some kind of control, assumes it has something to do with solidifying group dynamics now that they’re all back together, and doesn’t give it any more thought. It’s not until he’s suddenly on the committee for the second Greendale dance of the school year, and she finds what looks like a brand-new prom dress lying across her bed, that she gets a little suspicious. 

“Where did you get this?”

“I bought it.”

“How did you afford it?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I am worried about it, but more to the point, _why_ did you afford it?”

“It’s for the dance.”

“I gathered that much. Is there something wrong with the clothes I already have?”

“You have to wear something new,” Abed says, patiently, “that’s the whole point of the makeover trope.”

“You think I need a _makeover_?” Annie yelps, crossing her arms defensively over her blazer.

“Not inherently,” Abed says, reassuring, “just so that Jeff gets a good shock when you walk into the room.”

This very effectively derails any offense she might have taken. “What – Jeff?”

“And don’t tell me I’m interfering, because makeover is the least involved and least invasive trope I could think of. You wear a new dress, you put on a little extra eye makeup, you do something different with your hair, and _boom_ , suddenly it’s like he’s seeing you for the first time. It’s in every other high school film, it’s in _every_ princess movie. And look: free dress.”

She splutters, and finally manages, “What are you _doing_ , Abed?”

He sighs. “Annie, we’re in our fifth season. Obviously I appreciate that we can fall back on your unresolved tension whenever we’re low on fodder for the plot, but there’s a reverse danger to the moonlighting curse such that if we wait too long, then the expectations keep climbing beyond the point of ever being able to satisfy them. Now is the perfect time to move forward. You just need a little narrative push.”

“What – a narrative push – with _Jeff_?”

He gives her a look that is visual deadpan. The _duh-doy_ goes unsaid.

“Abed,” she says firmly, “I’m going to assume that this is because on some level you really do want me to find happiness and not because you’re bored, and if so that’s really sweet, but one of the consequences of us not really being characters in a tv show is that the people we’re meant to be with might _not_ be members of the main cast.”

Since the visual deadpan isn’t working, he adds a melodramatic eye-roll. “Oh, I’m sorry, have you suddenly developed an interest in dating randos? Did you join a service and sneak around meeting strange men all summer and I somehow didn’t notice? No wait, that can’t be it, we live together.”

“Well, maybe I _will_ ,” Annie bristles. “Strange men can’t be any stranger than the men I know!”

He sighs. “Face it. You’re almost as hyper-focused on the group as I am; if you’re going to have a serious relationship, it’s not going to be with a handsome stranger, it’s going to be with somebody from the inside. And if it was going to be me, then it would have happened over the hiatus when we were in close quarters all summer long in the sexy heat, and Troy couldn’t be home _all_ the time, and the lines in the relationship got blurred in new and exciting ways.”

“Um,” she says, shaken, “did you… _want_ that to happen?”

He shrugs. “Too late now. We really only have B-couple potential; if we get together at mid-season, chances are it’s just for cheap drama and we’ll break up a few episodes later. Easier not to risk it.”

She mentally struggles with the absoluteness of this pronouncement and then gives up. ‘Easier not to risk it’ just about covers any amount of tampering with her and Abed’s relationship; they have a status quo and it’s comfortable. Improvements rarely work out. “Wait,” she says, “so you think Jeff and I have A-couple potential?”

“Don’t make me laugh,” he says.

“What, so we have B-couple potential, too, but you don’t care if we break up?” she says, getting annoyed despite herself. “That’s not very nice, Abed.”

“No. You don’t have A-couple potential, you _are_ the A-couple. You have been for a long time.” 

“Abed,” she whines, “we’ve talked about this. There’s nothing there.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re trying to get him to fall in love with you so that you’ll never be unloved ever again, and he’s trying not to hurt you even though all he’s ever done is hurt and disappoint people. You’re right, I’m an idiot, there’s no story there.”

She almost asks if Jeff really said that, but bites her lip hard and resists. Of course he didn’t really say that. Jeff, clearly and voluntarily articulate his feelings? It’d have to be a really, _really_ alternate timeline. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” she says instead.

“Wearing a new dress and doing your hair?” Abed says. “If there’s really nothing there, what could it hurt?”

“Because you’ll escalate,” she says, pointing a finger at him. “I know you. If this is the least involved option, there are more involved ones waiting in the wings.”

If he was anyone else he would squirm, but he’s Abed, so instead he just stares at her head-on and she’s the one who gets uncomfortable. “I won’t have to break out the big guns,” he says. 

“And what are the big guns?”

“Easy. When one person is hurt and the other person comforts them – it’s best if it’s a near-death experience, but even the common cold can do it, because people are attracted to vulnerability and afraid of loss – and fake dating. But I’m not going to try to infect you with anything, because I don’t have any medical experience and I could too easily kill you. And the whole point of fake dating is that no one else knows it’s fake, so a third party like myself couldn’t maneuver you into it, it’d have to be your idea. But I’m telling you, it won’t go that far. The simple tropes are effective for a reason.”

Annie looks at the dress sideways. It’s a soft, shimmery gray, and it’s far fancier than the dance merits. “You know, Jeff has seen me in a dress before,” she says. 

“Trust the tropes, Annie.”

And she doesn’t. But she does trust that thwarting Abed’s plans is never a road to happiness.

When Troy gets home to change from his air conditioner repair jumpsuit into his dance formals, Annie’s sitting very still in a ratty button-down flannel and pajama pants with curlers in her hair, and Abed is doing her makeup, three different tutorials playing on various screens around the apartment. “Hey guys,” says Troy, in that eternally up-for-anything way of his, “what are we doing?” 

“Makeover trope,” Abed says, not looking up from his intent study of Annie’s closed eyelids.

“Cool!” Troy says. “Do I need to walk in again and be staggered by your totally unpredictable hotness now that you have extra gunk on your face?” He presses a hand to his heart and does a literal exaggerated stagger a few steps backwards. “Annie – I had no idea – where was this beauty before?? And will it be gone again without a trace when you wash your face tonight?”

Annie giggles. Abed swats her knee. “Hey!” she says.

“Stay still,” he remonstrates. “Troy, not everything is about you. This is for Jeff.” 

“Oh,” Troy says, without a trace of disappointment, “that makes more sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Annie says.

“Want me to do your nails for you?” Troy offers. “I have really steady hands, came with the repair superpowers.” He wiggles his fingers at her. Without looking, Abed reaches into the caboodle and tosses him a bottle.

“I’m so glad I live here,” Annie says. “However would I have made myself presentable without you?”

“The goal isn’t presentable,” Troy says, sitting beside Abed and shaking the bottle of bottom coat. “The goal is stunning.”

And she does look good, and Jeff does choke on his drink when he sees her, but that might be because she’s wearing a floor-length gown to a Greendale dance. Troy and Abed split off in opposite directions in front of her, probably for dramatic effect, and she makes her way across the cafeteria to Jeff’s table alone. 

“Um, Annie…” he says.

“What, this old thing?” she says sarcastically, taking a seat next to him. “Don’t ask.” 

“Was your apartment burglarized and this was the only thing they left behind, on account of not wanting the rest of their stash to get glittery?”

“Did I not just say not to ask?”

“You did,” he says. “Can I get you a drink?”

“That you can ask.”

He nods and slips away. Shirley and Britta join her at the table; Shirley exclaims over her dress and Britta looks skeptical but admits she looks nice. And then Jeff’s back with drinks for just the two of them, which earns him good-natured heckling, and Troy and Abed quit their to-no-purpose circling of the room, and they all sit together crowded around the little table, a barely-professor and a handful of perpetual students, a family. She might be dressed like a second-rate actress trying to look extra gorgeous because she got spurned at the Emmys, but these people see her. They always have, that’s why she loves them.

She’ll admit she looks nice. But Jeff’s not looking at her any different. He never does. 

When they’re driving home, Abed complains, “You didn’t even dance together.”

Annie reaches over to pat his shoulder. “I’m sure that’s why it didn’t work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm at it again! This story is not another _I'll tell you the truth_ , for a lot of reasons - one of which being that I haven't finished my first full draft yet, so updates may be thin on the ground if I hit a wall. It's also a little lighter, a little sillier, and a little less angsty. Also less edited.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy!


	2. EVERYONE CAN SEE IT

_our friends are laughing, ‘cause nothing like this ever happened to them_

Jeff scheduled his office hours from 11a.m. to 1p.m. in the cafeteria, so that when he’s actually in his office in the afternoons, he can sleep. At first they all complained – why should their lunches together be constantly ruined by brown-nosing students? Shouldn’t they value the time they have together more highly now that they’re not in any classes together? But they – and Jeff’s students – found pretty quickly that the conversations wouldn’t last long, and so everyone learned to deal. Occasionally someone will come along and ask for a makeup assignment or to have their test rescheduled, Jeff will send them off with a minimum of reassurance, and the group can go back to debating movie preferences or making fun of each other without being much inconvenienced.

Annie’s sitting at the corner of their table, Jeff’s pulled up a chair on the end next to her, and Abed’s at the other end, appearing to mind his own business in a way that’s, if rare, not inherently concerning. Shirley’s reading something for a class, Britta is trying to show something on her phone to Hickey, Troy is staring at something across the cafeteria, probably a girl. Annie and Jeff aren’t really talking, but they’re not _not_ talking either, going back and forth between eating in silence and making faces at each other when Britta says something ridiculous, then making snide comments to each other and telling each other to shut up and going back to silence. It has a rhythm like a song, and she knows all the words, when to chime in and when to sing backup. She doesn’t know when the song ends; maybe it never does, never will, and they’ll sing verse one and verse two back and forth forever without ever making it to anything like the bridge.

“Excuse me, Mr. Winger?”

They all stop what they’re doing and look up; it’s a probable freshman, sleek, pretty hair, bright coral lipstick. “Miss Chase,” Jeff says, betraying some surprise but no personal investment. “I know you know what the homework is, because you always double-check with me after class.”

“I had a question about the final paper,” she says. 

“God, Chase,” he says, “we aren’t even to midterms yet. You know professors don’t really mean it when they say it’s a semester-long research project, right? You’ll just end up having to rewrite it when you find out we go over all your points in class.”

“You’re going over points in class?” Annie asks mildly.

“I’m wounded you would even ask.”

“And is that points of _law_ that you’re going over, or rhetoric and sophistry?”

“Can it, Edison,” Jeff says, baring his teeth in an aggressively charming smile.

“Sorry,” Miss Chase says, cringing. “I didn’t mean to cause problems with you and your girlfriend.”

Annie represses the part of her that reared its head at the hotel the weekend of the spacetime conference, the part of her that wants to squeal right now, and schools her features to passively polite. Jeff crumples up his napkin and throws it onto the tray of trash in the center of their table. “We’ll be fine,” he says drily. “What’s your question?”

“Do you require a certain number of book sources?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So online sources are fine?”

“What do you think?”

“Well…thanks.”

“Anytime, as long as that time is between eleven and one on a Tuesday or Thursday.”

Miss Chase gives them all an awkward nod, and flees. 

“What was _that_ about?” Shirley says.

Jeff rolls his eyes and picks his phone back up. “Don’t know, normally she’s more on the ball than that.”

“Uh, no, do _you_ two have something you want to tell us?” Troy asks gleefully.

“What?” Jeff says.

“She said Annie was your girlfriend,” Abed says. “You didn’t stumble over a correction, you weren’t embarrassed. You didn’t even blink.”

“Oh, that,” Jeff says. “No point.”

“He’s right,” Annie says, carefully keeping her voice calm and even, “it’s easier to name people who know we’re _not_ a couple. Other than the people at this table, I’m pretty sure I can count through the list on one hand.”

“No way,” says Britta.

“The Dean, Chang,” Jeff says, counting on his fingers.

“Maybe Neil?” Annie says. Jeff puts up another finger.

“You two aren’t a couple?” Chang calls from a table over. “Who dumped who?” 

Annie looks at Jeff. He puts down a finger, and then, thinking better of it, another one, and flips Chang off.

“Oh my lord,” Shirley says. 

“And you’re fine with everyone thinking that?” Abed presses.

Jeff returns his attention to his phone, says dismissively, “Greendale’s gonna be wrong about things. Can’t drive yourself crazy trying to teach it.”

“That is literally your job,” Annie tells him.

“My job is to teach a very specific subset of Greendale about the fundamentals of law,” Jeff says. “Disabusing the entire student body and faculty lounge of certain misapprehensions about my personal life would be a whole other courseload worth of work, and I’m not being paid for that.”

“Annie?” Shirley asks.

She can feel herself blushing, but she says, “Honestly, it doesn’t come up much.”

“And neither of you is at all interested in being perceived as free to date someone else?” Hickey drawls. Abed’s eyes widen.

“Here?” Jeff says shortly. 

Grateful for the simple explanation, Annie says, “What he said.” 

“You people never get any less weird,” Hickey announces. He pushes out his chair and makes his exit; everyone returns to what they were doing, albeit shaking their heads a little in disapproval.

Annie corners Abed in the hall after his afternoon class gets out. “You?”

“Me what?”

“Don’t try to act innocent with me. You told that girl to come over and say I was Jeff’s girlfriend, didn’t you?”

“You said everybody thinks that.”

“Yeah, they _think_ it, they don’t walk right up and say it on a paper-thin excuse.”

Abed doesn’t say anything.

Annie sighs. “What kind of trope is that, anyway?” 

“Being mistaken for a couple goes one of two ways: either you get flustered and then can’t stop thinking about it, or, you play along and invent a fake relationship history on the spot, side-stepping into the fake-dating-slash-fake-marriage trope. Jeff didn’t do either.”

“He played along.”

“He didn’t play anything, he said you’d be fine. That was Jeff being himself, which apparently looks like he’s already dating you, even though he’s not.” 

She’d like to argue, but that just about covers it. 

“I think I must have some of the data wrong,” Abed says. 

“Yeah, you’re assuming Jeff’s pining for me and all it’s going to take is a new dress or for someone to use the world ‘girlfriend’ for him to realize it.”

He stares at her, and then snaps his fingers. “Jealousy. Jealousy always works on Jeff.” Before she can protest, he takes off down the hall, leaving Annie to think about other things that work on Jeff: conspiracies and mysteries and competitions. Maybe a narrative push _could_ do them a little good, in a different kind of story.

\---

Less than two weeks later, Pierce is dead and Troy is gone.

Abed wanders into her room an hour or so before midnight and sits on the end of the bed. She twists around in her desk chair and eyes him, but he doesn’t volunteer any information. She turns back to her computer, types a few lines. Behind her, Abed collapses into her pillows, looking like nothing so much as a lego minifigure unfolding. She waits. 

She doesn’t know how to fix this.

She looks over her shoulder. “Abed.” He lifts his head. “We’re going to be fine,” she tells him. “I promise I won’t try to insensitively co-opt all your regular bits with Troy. We’ll just focus on our bits, and come up with new bits.” 

“I know,” he says. 

“We can livetweet a Cougartown rewatch.”

“Yeah.” 

“We can…get Britta to teach us to knit.”

“Actually,” he says, “it’s a perfect time to take things to the next level on fixing the narrative around you and Jeff.”

She groans. “Abed, you’re just going to drive yourself crazy. And me. You’re going to drive me crazy.”

“But not Jeff?” he says, pointedly. “Because Jeff hasn’t even noticed.”

“Because he’s _unromantic_ , Abed. It just rolls off his back, like water off a duck.”

“No. If water is romantic tropes, then Jeff’s the fish who doesn’t know that he’s surrounded by it.”

She gasps. “There aren’t _that_ many romantic tropes around us.” Abed pushes himself up on his elbows and raises his eyebrows at her. Annie hmmps, sits cross-legged and backwards on her chair to more comfortably face him. “So, how does pouring more water into the fishpond help, anyway?”

“Not a fishpond,” Abed says. “The tropes are running water, like a stream: they’re going somewhere, and if they move fast enough all the fish get swept along. And at any rate, fish-Jeff would be miserable if he ever woke up and found that he’d been beached.”

“Are you sure he’s not a turtle?” Annie says, skeptically.

“Yes. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but can’t you see that it’s even more important now?” Abed says, and this is the Abed who could give Jeff a run for his money as charismatic leader, the Abed who ran a crime syndicate on the power of mass-produced chicken fingers, brainwashed an entire campus into believing that he was some kind of film Messiah, and could probably convince any girl that she’s in love with him if he ever wanted to try. He’s always intense, but when he focuses like this, he brings everyone into his vision with him. “We have some amount of control over what kind of story we’re living in,” he says, “but if we let bad things happen without striking back, making sure we balance it with light things and good things, we’ll lose that control. Pierce died. Troy could be anywhere right now. The stories that end with death and separation are _tragedies_ , and we’re starting to go that direction, but _comedies_ end with –”

“Marriage,” Annie finishes, heavily. “They end with a marriage.”

“I want this to be a comedy,” Abed says. “I want your stable relationship to be the narrative foundation for the rest of us staying together and having happy endings.”

She gets up and settles on the bed next to him. “Well, Troy did leave us alone in the apartment,” she says, dropping her head onto his shoulder. “Are you sure it isn’t time for the lines in _our_ relationship to get excitingly blurred?” 

He rests his head on hers and says, “No. Now we really can’t risk it.” 

She takes his hand and squeezes it. He’s not wrong. “I guess if you’re masterminding my love life you can hang out with Jeff more,” she says. “I know you’ve missed him.” 

He’s quiet, and then: “If we started dating, would Jeff be jealous?”

She sighs and extracts herself from under his chin, points at the door. “Alright, out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually had a professor who held his "office" hours in the cafeteria. I never understood why.
> 
> I love and appreciate your comments! Thanks for reading =)


	3. JEALOUSY

_there’s nothing I hate more than what I can’t have_

In the next couple weeks, Annie finds herself landing in an improbable number of passing conversations with attractive men she doesn’t know, and like clockwork, Jeff walks into the middle of every single one of them. The timing is impeccable, but unpredictable enough that she can’t avoid it; they always sneak up on her when she’s thinking of something else, even when she starts changing her daily route through campus. Some of the men are even kind of nice, but not knowing what Abed has told them neatly removes any temptation to respond to their advances with anything other than politeness: she’s not about to flirt with strangers whom Abed might have _hired_ to flirt with her. Then again, she’s also not about to refuse to tell them the time, and she can’t help it that she’s naturally friendly, and so she plays directly into Abed’s hands, time and time again.

And Jeff, for his part, _does_ seem to dislike all her interlocutors on sight, but that might have more to do with the men Abed’s picking: it’s a parade of Vaughn lookalikes interspersed with the odd Jeff lookalike. And honestly, there’s no need to posit that he has any feelings of possessiveness for her when random, macho competitiveness explains his reaction just as well. Jeff hates most other men as a rule. 

She can only imagine that the _specific_ reaction he’s having isn’t what Abed was hoping for. He acts generally mulish, his speeches gain a strong tinge of self-congratulation, and his clothes get progressively more blatantly expensive. He doesn’t give her any more attention than he already did, and he certainly doesn’t comment on her series of new friends – sure, he makes vague and critical pronouncements which just so happen to skewer whomever he most recently caught her talking to, but he never comes out with “so who was that” or “are you seeing that guy”. It’s certainly not difficult to make Jeff jealous, but it is difficult to make him respond to that jealousy in a normal, human way. 

Forward-movement-wise, it’s a wash; besides which, Annie’s getting a little tired of having her every move anticipated and interrupted, no matter how charming the interruption. She has things to _do_.

When the next person slides into opposite side of her booth in the cafeteria she doesn’t even look up from her homework, just spouts off, “It’s 2:15, the administrative offices are that way, I don’t know, thanks it’s new.” 

“Annie.”

She startles, and looks up. Jeff. “Oh, sorry,” she says, “allow me to tailor you a personal platitude: no, I will not help you grade your midterms.”

“Scantron, baby,” he says.

She rolls her eyes, but can’t complain. Law is, in fact, a subject that can lend itself to multiple choice exams. “What’s up?”

“Abed.”

She can’t help the blush she feels crawling over her face. She tries for disinterested lightness: “Well, obviously, something’s always up with Abed. But what do you know?”

The move was miscalculated; his eyebrows fly up. “What do you know?” 

“More than you, I bet,” she says. “And I asked first.”

He sighs, places both hands on the table, and leans forward conspiratorially. She crosses her arms and waits. Jeff says, “He signed me up for the charity bachelor auction.” 

Because if he couldn’t make Jeff jealous, the next logical step is to try to make her jealous. “Of course he did,” she says.

“You knew?” Jeff accuses.

“No, actually, but are you really surprised?”

“Yes! Who would do that?”

She gives him a look.

“Okay, I know who would do that,” he amends, “but why _me_?”

“In principle, you are willing to go out with random women.”

“I am _not_.”

“You’re willing to make out with random women?”

“I’m not willing to be _paid_ for it!”

“That’s no problem then,” Annie says breezily, “they’re not paying you. They’re paying charity. You can’t take money away from _charity_ , Jeff.”

“That’s what Abed said.” He leans in again and jabs the table with his pointer finger. “But I never agreed to this, and I could always donate to charity myself, and are we really sure that whatever the Dean picked is actually a real charity?”

She snorts delicately. “Sounds to me like you’re scared.”

“Yeah. I could meet someone psychopathic, who will murder me before I can murder Abed.”

“Or maybe you’ll meet someone nice.” 

He gives her a look, and she has to incline her head. It _is_ unlikely, and honestly, she would hate it almost as much as him getting murdered. Maybe more. If he got murdered she could mourn him and then romanticize his memory. If he met someone nice, he’d be free to murder Abed, and then Abed would be dead and Jeff would be dating some floozy and she’d have to deal with mourning and jealousy and seething, seething hatred. 

Yeah, meeting someone nice is definitely worse.

\---

The auction is about as bad as she thought it would be – Jeff is all the way across the room with the other bachelors, so she can’t talk to him. He’s wearing a suit, so her eyes keep sliding over to him, and he’s bored, so he keeps catching her staring. And she can’t escape the constant whispers of his name, because half of the tipsily giggling women crammed into the cafeteria seem to be there specifically to bid on him.

But she can’t leave, because Shirley and Britta would think it was odd, and she can’t complain, because Abed would think he was getting to her, which he _isn’t_.

They’re going through the bachelors in reverse seniority order: the freshmen first, then the sophomores, and so on. The underclassmen’s dates up for auction were simple, a few of them literally offering up breakfast in the caf; they went for twenty bucks or so, but the dates have been getting progressively more extravagant, and the men more distinguished, as the night goes on. Jeff will likely be the big finale.

“I can’t decide if this is cleverly exposing how ridiculous it is that our culture thinks that men are entitled to women’s time and attention if they spend enough money, or if it’s just a further instance of the market invading every aspect of the social sphere,” Britta says. “Plus, drawing attention to a double standard doesn’t necessarily get to the bottom of the issue. So this would never fly, ordinarily. So what? It’s not like men are really experiencing the plight of women. When women sell themselves they’re whores, but when men sell themselves they’re philanthropists.” 

“The money _is_ going to charity,” Shirley says mildly. “And I’m sure that given the circumstances, money changing hands and so on, none of the young ladies would dream of anything physical happening.”

Britta and Annie avoid her eyes. “Well, now that they’ve got their foot in the door…” Annie says.

“Turnabout…only fair…” Britta murmurs.

Shirley gasps. “Well, Jeff wouldn’t.”

“Under normal circumstances, Jeff wouldn’t be here,” Annie points out. She throws another glance over her shoulder; he’s leaning against the wall, on his phone, but he looks up and makes an aggrieved face at her. She pouts, hoping that this communicates _Oh, poor you_ , and not _I miss you, why are you so far away?_ She turns back to face the others, says, “Even if there’s potential for him to enjoy himself, if it wasn’t his idea then he’ll be miserable on principle.”

There are nods and general murmurs of agreement. Abed appears to consider this, and reject it.

“Oh, yeah,” Annie remembers, and elbows Britta. “Dowries.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the old days when women had to have substantial funds stored away to be paid to the family of their husband in order to be considered eligible. Maybe that’s what bachelor auctions are about.”

Britta heaves a gasp that’s almost worthy of Annie. “ _Insidious_.”

At last, Dean Pelton bangs his gavel, applauds the lucky young woman who just landed a date with Magnitude for $92, and then waves the crowd to silence. The room settles, but it seems like there are still too many people – shouldn’t more women have left by now? No one’s allowed to bid again once they’ve won, and how much fun can it really be to watch other people bid on dates you can’t have? 

The Dean adjusts his suspenders – he looks like he owns an old-timey ice cream shoppe more than like whatever he was aiming for – and speaks into the microphone. “Our last ticket of the night is a night out with a close personal friend of mine – unmatched in courtesy, an excellent dancer, witty and powerful with a heart of gold, put your hands together for the rightful king of Greendale, Jeffrey Winger!”

Jeff takes one step out onto the stage, and the cafeteria positively _erupts_. He waves, and then shrugs out of his suit jacket and slings it over his arm. Out of the corner of her eye, Annie thinks she sees somebody swoon. 

“Oh, this is _so_ bad for him,” Britta groans.

“Yeah,” Annie agrees faintly.

“Jeffrey, why don’t you tell the ladies what they have to look forward to on a date with you?” Dean Pelton says.

“Thanks, Craig,” Jeff says, and bends himself in two to speak into the microphone. “We will be getting a candlelit dinner at Le Lieu de la Fausse Nourriture, followed by a nice stroll around the park, and then drinks…at my place.”

There’s a collective intake of breath, which is mostly drowned out by the microphone picking up Dean Pelton’s “ _Jeffrey_ ”. Shirley also says “Jeffrey!”, but she’s shaking her head. Annie bites her lip, hard; he’s overdoing it, and she doesn’t know _why_.

The Dean nudges him out of the way and stammers into the microphone, “For legal reasons, students currently enrolled in Mr. Winger’s courses will not be permitted to bid.”

“No fair!” somebody yells shrilly. Someone else boos. A handful of students actually get up and head for the doors. 

“It’s for legal reasons!” the Dean says. “My hands are tied!”

Jeff leans into the mic, says, “And while we’re talking about not entering into legally sketchy situations, I think that same reasoning applies to my bosses bidding on the date, don’t you?” The Dean squeaks, a few students chuckle. Jeff opens his arms and offers a smarmy smile to the audience. “My hands are tied.”

He gets a laugh; some of the tension breaks. They all remember that this is Greendale, that the hottest bachelor of the night is an adjunct who’s not qualified to teach his subject, that their auctioneer is a man whose bare legs they’ve all seen a little too much of on more than one occasion. Annie lets out a surreptitious breath; maybe this won’t be so bad.

“Let’s start the bidding a-a-at…fifty dollars!” Dean Pelton sing-songs. Before he can even repeat _Do I see fifty_ , a woman in the middle of a crowded table lifts her paddle; her voice rings out firm and clear: 

“One hundred dollars.” 

The Dean looks at her, perplexed. “Well, that’s –”

“One hundred and twenty!” a different woman calls.

“A hundred and thirty!”

“Hundred and thirty-five!”

Annie glances nervously around the cafeteria; there are too many people bidding. And was that one voice – ?

“One hundred and fifty.”

Oh my god, it is, it’s Annie Kim. 

“Hundred and fifty-five!”

“A hundred and sixty-five.”

“Do I hear a hundred and seventy? A hundred and seventy from the lady in the fuchsia sequins.”

She can’t keep up with all the new voices, the paddles going up and down all over the room, the rapidly rising number. 

Annie Kim lifts her paddle. “A hundred and _eighty_ ,” she says, smiling smugly at Jeff.

Annie forcibly unclenches her hands, and then doesn’t know what to do with them. She elects to finish her drink, but that only takes a moment and then she’s at loose ends again.

“Hundred and eighty-five!”

“Two hundred!”

“ _Two hundred_?!” the Dean repeats. “Do I have two hundred and ten?” 

“Two hundred and ten!”

“Two fifteen!”

Annie looks up from twisting her napkin and sees that Britta and Shirley are watching her with something very like sympathy.

“Two fifteen, do I hear two thirty? Remember ladies, this is for charity!”

“Two fifty,” Annie Kim drawls. 

Shirley winces. Abed actually curses, seemingly out of a sense of awe. 

“How _generous_ ,” the Dean exclaims, his voice wobbling.

Annie shoots a nervous glance toward the stage and, like magic, immediately catches Jeff’s eye. He stills, his face softens, and he offers her the slightest self-aware smile – and she wonders if her control is going to hold. 

“Two fifty going once?”

“Two fifty-five!” the first woman to bid snaps, glaring at Annie Kim.

“Two seventy-five,” Annie Kim says, voice dripping boredom.

“Two seventy-six,” the woman bites out.

Annie Kim glances up from examining her nails but doesn’t acknowledge her competitor; she looks straight at Annie. “Two eighty.”

Annie surges to her feet, blurts, “ _Three fifty_.”

“Three _fifty_?” the Dean practically chokes. “Did I hear three fifty, where was that?”

“Oh, Annie,” Shirley says softly.

She doesn’t look at Jeff. She _can’t_ look at Jeff. She fumbles for her paddle, raises it in the air and repeats shakily, “Three hundred and fifty.”

Annie Kim’s eyebrows raise; she lifts her paddle and tells Annie, conversational, “Three hundred and seventy-five.”

“Three hundred and seventy-five,” the Dean says, “do I hear three eighty?”

Annie raises her paddle, looks her evil twin dead in the eye, and says flatly, “Four hundred.”

Annie Kim shoots back, “Four _twenty-five_.”

“Four twenty-five,” the Dean says, nearly sobbing. “Do I hear –?”

Annie crosses her arms, says, “Five hundred.” 

Annie Kim flings her arm out and points like she’s auditioning for _The Crucible_. “ _She’s in his fundamentals class!_ ”

“I dropped that class the first week of the semester,” Annie says calmly. She cocks her head, says with a smile, “If you can’t raise the bid, just admit it.”

Annie Kim snarls; Annie raises her eyebrows.

“Five hundred going once?” Dean Pelton says. “Twice?” The cafeteria is dead silent, Annie feels a lot of eyes on her and resists the irrational urge to preen. “Sold,” says the Dean, “to the pretty young lady with the codependency issues. I mean, good lord, Annie. Seriously.” 

The room heaves a collective sigh, and the whispers start up. 

She flips her hair over her shoulder and retakes her seat, pretending with everything in her that she doesn’t have a care in the world and that she’s not drowning in relief.

“I sure am glad you saved Jeffrey from that girl’s clutches,” Shirley says, not sounding sure at all.

“Well, _I’m_ going to go to the bathroom,” Britta says pointedly. “Shirley? Join me?”

“Ooh, yes,” Shirley says. They bustle off, shooting Annie nervous and pitying looks over their shoulders. 

Abed slides over to sit in the empty seat next to her. She doesn’t look at him, she just says, “Tell me you didn’t have anything to do with Annie Kim’s persistence.”

“No. That would be crossing the line. I know that.”

She looks at him sideways and smiles weakly. “I’m glad.”

“It did work though. An unexpected cocktail of romantic jealousy, professional jealousy, and protectiveness over Jeff. I’m not surprised I didn’t think of it.”

“Hmm,” she says, non-committal. 

“So you’re going to get dinner with Jeff. And,” he adds, waggling his eyebrows, “ _drinks_. Do you feel good? Are you happy?”

“I’m fine,” she says.

“Hey,” says Jeff, and she turns around, unable to help the bashful smile that appears on her face. 

“Hey, Jeff,” Abed says.

“Hey, Abed,” Jeff says, distractedly. “Annie, what were you _thinking_?”

“It worked, didn’t it?” she says drily. 

“Five hundred was our entire budget! And you went _straight there_ , in _three bids_.”

“She had to know I meant business,” Annie says, “or she was going to keep outbidding me by tens and twenties and we would have breezed right by the big numbers without her even noticing. And it’s hardly my fault that you got everyone riled up with your stupid date description.”

Jeff groans, but he pulls his wallet out of his back pocket and hands her a bundle of bills. “You just wanted to fleece me for the maximum amount,” he complains.

“Could be,” Annie says. She thumbs through the bills and separates them into two stacks; she holds the smaller one up. “Guess what, Abed?”

“I don’t guess,” he says.

“We’re going to make rent this month,” she tells him sweetly.

“What a relief.” 

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Jeff says, offering her his hand.

Instead of shaking, she takes his hand and lets him pull her to her feet. “Celebratory drinks,” she raises her eyebrows, “ _at our place_?”

He laughs. “I don’t drink the swill you have at your place. Some other time.” He squeezes her hand, nods at Abed, and heads out, giving Annie Kim a wide berth.

“You’re not going on the date, are you?” Abed says.

“No, we are not. But good try.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The other way this could have gone is absolutely _no one_ bidding on Jeff, because he's a weirdo. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! =)


	4. KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR

_take away the pain, ‘cause I see sparks fly whenever you smile_

“Hey, why didn’t the debate championship kiss work?”

Annie looks up from the binder she’s organizing. Abed’s stuck his head through her doorway – only his head, in the way that’s awkward and uncomfortable and hence only done in movies – and is waiting expectantly for an answer. “Uh, work?” she says.

“You had to kiss for a contrived reason, _and_ it was on stage in front of an audience. Either one of those would usually clinch a relationship going forward as a sure thing, but you’ve already been-there-done-that, and it failed. Why?”

She sighs and puts down her sticky tabs. “Maybe because I only kissed him so he’d drop a disabled kid on the floor, and then I announced to the whole assembled crowd that the fact that it worked meant he was fundamentally evil?”

He stares at her, considering. Finally: “That could be it.” He ducks back into his room and she hears aggressive crumpling of paper. She sets her project aside and follows him.

He hasn’t graduated to the full-on bulletin board and red yarn stage, but there is what seems to be a _lot_ of research on the floor. “Are you getting film credit for this?” Annie asks mildly. “Because you should be getting film credit for this. Call it an independent study, or a thesis or something.”

He’s flipping through a pile of stapled together papers. “Maybe.” He looks at her sideways. “You shouldn’t be here. Your awareness of the tropes is probably what’s upsetting them.”

“You’re aware of tropes all the time, and it seems to work out fine for you.”

“Yeah, Rachel’s fantastic, but you’re not Rachel, and neither is Jeff.”

She raises her hands in surrender and takes a step backwards into the hallway. “Just tell me this: should I be concerned? How close are we to you breaking out the big guns?” 

He thinks about it. “Rachel’s not medically trained either.”

“Thank god.”

“And I still haven’t been able to run a scenario that ends with you fake-dating. The usual excuses are reunions or weddings where you’re likely to run into former bullies, evil exes, or dying parents. You have bullies from high school and Jeff has bullies from his old firm, but neither of you would purposely go somewhere you’re likely to see them. A cameo from Slater, Vaughn, or Rich is possible, but more likely to circle back to the same old jealousy issues or even an ill-advised hook-up, and besides, Britta’s around all the time and you both deal with that fine. And between the two of you, you only have one non-estranged parent, and Darlene is in perfect health.” 

“Yeah, that’s too bad.”

“I’m stating a fact. I’m sure she’d be all for Jeff falling in love, but she’s not dying, so she just doesn’t have the clout right now.”

“I’m sorry, are you in contact with Jeff’s mother?” 

He looks at her, impassive.

She heaves an irritated sigh. “Forget I asked.”

But when she’s back on her bed carefully labeling her color-coded binder dividers, she has to admit that maybe Abed has, totally inadvertently, shown her something. Whether through his stubborn persistence in regards this thing with Jeff, or as a result of his insane Brett Underjaw stunt, or even just because he seems so genuinely happy with Rachel, he’s left her with the uncomfortable realization that her life isn’t as complete as it could be. And maybe, just maybe, she could be doing something about that.

So she puts out tentative feelers, sends a few texts: does anybody know any nice, single guys they could set her up with? 

She doesn’t ask anybody from the group. She’s gotten involved with too many of Britta’s exes already, and while she’s sure the boys from Shirley’s church are perfectly nice, she feels certain there would be a non-zero amount of pressure to convert, and, well, Judaism is pretty much the only part of her family upbringing that she’s held onto. She doesn’t mention it to Abed, for obvious reasons. Or Jeff. For cowardly reasons. But there are friendly acquaintances from her summer volunteer work and various Greendale clubs, and so on. It’s actually an old coworker from the pharmaceutical company who passes her number on to Grant Thomas.

According to the results of her cursory google search, Grant is a year older than she is, recently transplanted from California and working in sales. He looks to be of average height, with severely slicked-back dark hair and a gaze that pierces the camera like he’s interrogating it. He seems to wear a lot of khakis. He’s not – love at first sight, or anything. He’s not a lot of things. But it’s a blind date. It’s not supposed to be what you’d expect, or what you’d pick for yourself.

Sure enough, Grant does text her, and asks her out for dinner so straightforwardly that it’s almost businesslike. He just finds out when she’s free, says he’ll make a reservation, and asks for her address so he can pick her up. He doesn’t even ask her much about herself, just acknowledges that she used to work with Ginny.

“Straightforward is good,” Annie tells herself, checking her outfit for wrinkles in the mirror. “No games is good. All text and no subtext is good.”

Abed is at the movies with Rachel, so she doesn’t have to sneak out of the apartment, thankfully. Since she would have had to go downstairs to let him in anyway, Grant doesn’t even need to come up, he just texts her from the car while he’s circling the block. She ducks into his little two-seater, he offers her a perfunctory ogle-and-handshake combo, and then they’re off. 

This, apparently, is dating.

\---

_Abed, I’m really sorry, but when your movie lets out could you come get me from Cucchiara’s downtown?_

The answering text comes quicker than she expected: _How did you get there?_

She sighs, types out the incriminating truth: _I was supposed to be on a date. Are you texting in the movie theater?_

_Rachel sent me to get more popcorn during a dull moment which we agreed upon beforehand based on our three previous viewings of Interstellar. Did you get stood up?_

_Kind of_

There’s a longer pause, and so she texts again: _It’s no rush. I don’t want to completely ruin your date. The restaurant people feel sorry enough for me that I can hang out here for a while longer before they kick me out._

She nervously picks at a piece of bread from the basket. There are so many broken-off bits of crust scattered across her white napkin that it looks like she poured corn flakes directly into her lap. Her phone finally buzzes:

_Nope. Hold tight. Help is on the way._

She sighs, feeling relief and dread in equal measure, and picks up her fork to poke at the plate of antipasti in front of her. She’s not hungry, but she doesn’t want to go home and have no other option but to eat buttered noodles either. She gives up on her fork, dips her mauled piece of bread into oil, and nibbles at it.

“Everything alright?”

Annie smiles weakly up at her waitress. “Thanks, everything’s fine. Somebody’s coming to ger me.”

The older girl nods, her brow furrowed in what is, frankly, an excess of sympathy. “Can I get you anything?”

“No, that’s okay. Do you need the table?”

“No, you just stay right here.” She pats Annie’s shoulder awkwardly and goes off to attend to the neighboring tables, the occupants of which are shooting Annie slightly scandalized glances, no doubt wondering what is so wrong with her that caused this to happen. She lifts her chin stubbornly. She’s not making a scene, she’s just eating alone in a nice restaurant. With somebody else’s plate of food abandoned across from her. Having had to ask her waitress if she’s seen the guy she came in with, and if so, where did he go?

Nothing to see here.

She checks her phone, and then, half-despairingly, starts to eat. She may as well deal with Abed’s pity, judgment, and/or disappointment on a full stomach. 

Ten minutes later she feels a hand on her shoulder and looks up, expecting Rachel or maybe the waitress again. But it’s Jeff, looking slightly out of place in the upscale setting in his jeans and sweater, or maybe just looking out of place because he’s Jeff, and he’s always in focus when the rest of the world is fuzzy and confusing. At any rate, he’s certainly drawing curious stares as he looms over her. “What are you doing here?” she asks, looking behind him for his date – but there doesn’t seem to be one.

“Abed called me,” he answers, squeezing her shoulder. “You want to get out of here, or do you want to finish your dinner?”

“I –” she starts shakily, and has to stop and clear her throat. “I want to get out of here.”

“Want dessert or anything? We can order dessert.”

“No. Thanks. I just want to go home.” 

He nods, and manages to catch her waitress’s eye from across the dining room; she comes rushing over. “Can we get the check?”

“I’ve got it, Jeff,” Annie says.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he tells her. “Actually,” he pauses, checks the waitress’s nametag, “Gianna, can you fill a couple leftover boxes with whatever’s good for dessert, and then bring us the check?”

“We don’t have a way to transport the gelato, but we have house-made authentic Italian cookies, and tiramisu,” Gianna tells him.

“Great,” Jeff says. “Do that. Could we get a bottle of chianti to go, as well?”

“Of course,” she says, looking a little stunned. “I’ll be right back.”

“Thanks, Gianna.” She hurries off towards the kitchen; Jeff slides into the chair opposite Annie.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Annie tells him, half-accusative.

He shrugs. “You can take it home and put it in the fridge if you don’t want it, but this way we don’t have to stop to pick up Ben and Jerry’s on the way.”

“I don’t need heartbreak ice cream.”

“I never said it was for heartbreak.” He taps the table with one finger, asks mildly, “Abed says you got stood up, but I notice there’s two orders of food here.”

She holds his eyes. “He got up to take a phone call during the appetizers and then never came back.” 

His face darkens. “Would you like me to kick his ass?”

“No, but thanks.”

“If you’re worried about the fact that I’ve only ever been in one fight, I bet Hickey would help me. That guy’s terrifying.”

“ _No_ , Jeff. I don’t care that much. I just need a ride home.”

He lifts his hands in surrender. “And that’s why I’m here.”

Gianna comes back with the check, which Jeff snatches out of Annie’s reach before she can even look at it. 

“I can pay for my own food,” she says, as he hands off his credit card.

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s what your sorry excuse for a date would have had you do if he’d bothered to stay,” Jeff replies disdainfully, “but he’s not here. I am. And you’re not paying for the privilege of being stood up.”

He ignores her inarticulate gasp and leans back in his chair. People are still definitely staring, but somehow with _less_ judgment now that she’s to all appearances on a second date with a substitute guy in the space of half an hour. Britta would probably have something to say about this – people would rather see a girl flit from man to man than see a woman powerfully alone? – but honestly Annie wouldn’t have minded if Abed or Troy or even Pierce swept in and bossed everyone around and made a scene. It only hurts because it’s Jeff, because he’ll come out to a restaurant and sit with her in public while people stare in order to save her, but he’d never, ever be caught dead here otherwise. Not if she’d actually donated five hundred bucks to charity, not if there was an ominous voice-modulated serial menace on the phone demanding that they define the relationship, probably not even if Abed infected him with ebola. 

Gianna runs Jeff’s card and tells them their desserts will be ready in just a minute; Jeff thanks her in a low voice and leaves a whopping tip on the table once she’s gone. He gets up, says he’ll pull the car around; Annie sits back and waits. 

Gianna returns, laden with Styrofoam boxes and a wine bottle in a paper bag, and chirps, “So, you really traded up, huh?”

Annie lets out a surprised laugh. “He’s a friend.” 

Gianna raises an eyebrow. “Quite the friend.”

“Yeah,” Annie agrees, thinking also of Abed, who’s no doubt enjoying the second half of Interstellar feeling pretty pleased with himself. “He’s really something.”

When she’s seated and buckled in Jeff’s car, he asks, “So do you want to talk about it?”

“We don’t have to. You’ve already thrown money, food, and alcohol at the problem, you’ve done your duty.”

“Hey, I’m not trying to make the problem go away,” he says defensively. “Do you think I’m completely stupid about women?” 

She shoots him an unimpressed look. 

“Seriously, how’d you even know the guy?” 

She sighs. “Somebody I used to work with set us up. She said she thought we’d be a good match because we’re both so _driven_.”

“And actually he’s such a slacker that he left so he wouldn’t have to pay for dinner?”

“No, actually, when he figured out that I’m a student and unpaid assistant dean at a community college, he decided we wouldn’t be such a power couple after all, gave up on trying to make conversation, took a phonecall, and left.”

Jeff takes his eyes off the road to stare at her for a second. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. I think he saw it as more of a networking opportunity than a date.”

“God, Annie.”

“It’s okay.”

“That is not okay at all.” He glances between her and the road, looking agitated in a way that usually spells disaster. “You know that’s a load of crap, right?”

“Obviously I know people aren’t supposed to bail on their dates halfway through.”

“No, you know that’s not true about you.” 

“Let’s not, Jeff, please?”

He lets out a long breath. “We don’t have to talk about it,” he says in a low voice, “but you’re worth a dozen of him.”

She wraps her arms around herself and doesn’t answer.

\---

When Abed walks in the front door, his eyes widen, and Annie feels a tiny surge of petty satisfaction that she’s managed to surprise him back. Jeff is leaning back in a chair with his feet up on the kitchen table and Annie’s next to him with her feet tangled up under her and her knees bumping into the underside of the table; the wine bottle is empty between them.

“Abed’s home,” Jeff announces unnecessarily. “Abed’s a terrible drinking buddy, did you know that?”

“ _You’re_ a terrible drinking buddy,” she retorts. “We split the bottle and you’re still basically sober.”

He lifts both his index fingers and, grinning, touches them to his nose one after another in quick succession to show off his sobriety. She groans and drops her forehead onto the table. 

“Jeff,” Abed says. “You’re still here.”

“Clearly,” Jeff answers.

“How’s Annie?”

“ _Also_ here,” she says, not bothering to lift her head, “ _clearly_.”

“How was Interstellar the fourth time?” Jeff asks.

“Better than the first time, not as good as the third, but that’s probably because I was distracted.”

“I said I was sorry,” Annie says, muffled.

“It was a special case. I’ll let it slide. Next time you could always just call Jeff, though.”

“That’s right,” Jeff says, smugly. “I killed it.”

“Hey,” Annie protests, “how about instead we plan for this never happening to me again?”

“I don’t know the guy,” Abed tells her, “but I believe the situation requires that I call him a bastard.”

“Yes!” Annie exclaims. “He _is_ and it _does_.” She turns to look at Jeff; he’s almost upside-down in her field of vision and she can’t quite interpret how it is he’s looking at her, but just at the moment she doesn’t care. “Why didn’t you call him a bastard, Jeff?”

“I threw money and alcohol at the problem, remember?”

“Oh yeah. Good job.” She lifts her head and looks around. “Do we have any more cookies?”

“We ate the cookies.”

She locks eyes with him and unleashes the full power of the Disney face. 

He rolls his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re doing that for, I’m not going back to the restaurant to get more. I don’t think they’re even open at this hour. The tiramisu is in the fridge, do you want that?”

She considers. “Maybe? You go get that, I’ll look in the pantry.” She maneuvers her way out of her chair and dashes for the kitchen; Jeff lets his feet drop off the table and hit the floor with a _thwack_ , pushes himself to a standing position, then follows her with less bounce. “We have oreos!” she announces.

“You’re not going to put oreos in the tiramisu, are you?” Jeff says.

“I haven’t decided yet,” she sing-songs.

He sticks out his tongue and gags.

“I’m going to bed,” Abed tells them. She can’t tell whether his tone is concern for what they’re going to get up to, or hidden glee that his plan worked so well. But his plan _hasn’t_ worked. Sure, Jeff drove up in a blaze of glory and rescued her, but now they’re just eating. That’s not romantic. It’s…practical. She calls out a ‘good night’ and goes back to digging through their cabinets.

“There’s some strawberries in here,” Jeff reports from the fridge. “Want those?”

“Yeah, but we have to save some.”

“You said the same thing about the cookies.”

“But I mean it about the strawberries, or I won’t have anything to put in my yogurt tomorrow.”

“You couldn’t buy yogurt with the strawberries already in it like a regular person?”

“Shhhh.” She drops some oreos into a plastic bag, roots around in the junk drawer for the meat tenderizer, and then hits the bag with it. Jeff jumps, which makes her laugh almost too hard to hit the bag again.

When the cookies are crumbs, he informs her, “You’re a menace.” He sets the open containers of tiramisu and strawberries on the counter between them and hands her a fork; she carefully dusts oreo crumbs over exactly half the tiramisu and throws a few strawberry halves on top for good measure. He leans back against the counter; she rests her forearms on the edge and sighs. It’s been a stupid day, but this part of it doesn’t suck.

She’s been alternating forkfuls with Jeff for a few comfortable minutes when she glances over and realizes how near he is. That isn’t exceptional, obviously. They’re close to each other all the time: they walk side by side, they sit next to each other in the cafeteria, he hovers over her while she digs stuff out of her locker. But his legs are stretched so far into the narrow aisle of the galley kitchen that he’s almost forming a right angle, and normally his face isn’t quite so close to hers. It’s fine, there’s nothing exactly odd about it; it’s how average height people must talk to each other all the time. But it’s hard to think of the current arrangement as anything other than _within kissing distance._

Of course, that’s not inherently exceptional, either, since it’s not like they haven’t done that, as well.

Then again, sometimes anything closer than the exact distance between their spots at the study room table feels extra close. She’s used to him being a few feet away just a little off to her right – that’s where her eyes automatically stray to look for him, even when they’re at some other table, even when he’s not there at all – that’s where she’s used to finding him, that’s where she finds him already looking back at her.

She straightens self-consciously, spears another strawberry. Jeff smiles at her, all eye-crinkles and warmth and solidity, and she spins around and leans against the counter herself so she doesn’t have to look at him head-on. “You’re all independent, right?” she asks, twirling her fork absently.

“What?”

“Struck out on your own, did it all yourself, don’t need nobody and nobody needs you.”

He gives her an odd look, says, “I am known for that, yes.”

“Ever wish you weren’t?”

Jeff groans. “Forget about that guy, Annie. He’s a waste of space and you don’t need him.”

“This isn’t about _him_.” She snorts derisively. “Him, _no_. I don’t even mean dating.”

“Okay,” Jeff says, gamely. “So what do you mean?”

“It’s just like – when something like this happens, there’s people you call, right?”

He nods. “You called Abed.”

“Because we live together, yeah. But it’s like –” She shoots a quick glance sideways at him. 

She’s not nearly drunk enough to _not_ realize this is stupid. This is a conversation to have with Shirley in the women’s bathroom, not with Jeff, in her kitchen, when she’s tipsy and he’s buzzed and they’re a hair’s breadth away from each other for some reason she can’t remember or understand. She should backtrack. She should tell him to go home. She should kick him in the shin so he stands up straight and looks at her from his usual safe distance of a foot and a half. 

But all his attention is on her, and he doesn’t look at all pitying or scandalized, and right now that feels important. 

“Okay. It’s not that I want to be able to call,” she says, stumbling only slightly over the words, “my _parents_.” She sees him nodding out of the corner of her eye, and she presses on, “I don’t actually want them to drop everything and come pick me up when I’m stranded – but that’s the whole _point_ of parents, that they _would_ , that they’re supposed to, they _have_ to. They’re the people you call when you get bad news, or you’re in an accident.” She takes a shaky breath, says, “And I know I can take care of myself, I don’t _need_ them, but sometimes I wish I had somebody who was just – the person I call, the person who’ll drop everything and come get me, not because they’re close by or it’s convenient right now but because they’re _mine_ and they wouldn’t dream of doing anything else. I wouldn’t have to think who’s around or who’d be willing or who owes me, I’d just know they’re the person, and I’d call.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” he says. 

“But there is, right?” she says. “Cause when I was a kid I thought I knew exactly who I could count on, who would always be there for me, and I counted on that and I got hung out to dry.”

He pauses, says carefully, “Doesn’t mean you stop needing it.” 

“Come on,” she says, trying to sound cool and casual and not totally wrecked, “you’re Jeff Winger. I asked you because you’re supposed to tell me that I _don’t_ need it, and you don’t believe in any of that stuff anyway, it’s all a fraud and a conspiracy.” 

“Maybe it isn’t, all.”

She laughs, and it sounds watery and awful, so she follows it up with a groan. “It doesn’t matter, because I’m terrible at all of it. Terrible at being independent, and terrible at relying on people.” 

For a fleeting second, Jeff slings an arm around her shoulder and pulls her close. A part of her wants to burrow into his side, but she doesn’t do it, and the weight of his embrace is gone before she’s fully processed it. After a moment, he says seriously, “I don’t know if I needed my father. I didn’t think I did, for a long time, and I’m still not sure if I needed him then let alone if I need him now. But I had my mom. She could be my person, even if I didn’t want to need one.” He heaves a sigh. “You, on the other hand, got a really awful deal.”

_I really did._ “I _am_ fine,” she says instead.

“You’re better than fine,” he says, a little bit of his usual charm leaking in. “You’re amazing, and anybody allowed to be in your life and take your calls should count themselves lucky. I think we just have to…to choose a little more carefully who that is, now that we’re not kids anymore and we have a say in it.”

She leans one elbow on the counter and finally looks up at him, feeling helpless. She has chosen people, did choose people – and Troy is gone and Hickey will never begin to replace Pierce and when they weren’t all at Greendale they barely heard from each other at all. “How are we supposed to do that?” she asks.

He looks her in the eye and smiles, a little sadly. “I don’t know.”

“Let me know if you figure it out?”

“You bet.”

She smiles at him, and it’s terrifying, but when she wants to drop her head onto his shoulder, she lets herself.

“Annie.”

She sighs. “Yeah?”

“What Abed said, it was true. If something happens, you can call me.”

She lifts her head up; he’s looking at her intently. “You don’t have to say that.” 

“No, I mean it,” he says. “You can always call me. You’re important to me, and I promise to drop whatever.”

“Thanks,” she manages, in a small voice. “And for – tonight. For coming to get me, and then for staying.”

He just nudges her with his elbow. She smiles, and then pulls her eyes away from his and checks the stovetop clock.

He takes the cue. “I should probably go.”

She doesn’t want to agree; she knows she should, has to, even. “Are you good to drive?”

“I’ll call a cab. If you could drive my car to campus on Monday that’d be great.”

She nods. “Sure.”

The next morning, Abed keeps one eye on her while they both prepare for the day. She pretends not to notice, and has to drink half her cup of coffee before she can work up the nerve to say, “Thanks for calling Jeff.”

Abed spoons another bite of lucky charms into his mouth and doesn’t say anything.

“Your smugness is not helping your case,” she says.

He fixes her with an unimpressed stare. “My case doesn’t need any help.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may have to wait a bit for chapter five, as it's giving me trouble, but in the meantime, this one's extra long to make up for it!


	5. HURT/COMFORT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is mainly centered around the episode “G.I. Jeff”, and as such has all the associated content warnings: suicide mention, overdose, etc. The first scene and the last scene are both safe, so if you want to stop before the first "---" and pick back up again after the last one, you should feel free to do so!

__

_hey, it’s all me, just don’t go_

The little bit of positive reinforcement absolutely goes to Abed’s head, and his meddling reaches a fever pitch, getting more complex and even less likely to work as he goes.

He drags them all out to karaoke, seemingly in the hopes that either Annie or Jeff will inadvertently pour their heart out in song in front of the entire bar. Jeff refuses to sing on principle, the principle in question likely being that he’s afraid someone will film him. Annie can’t find a song she likes, and is slightly concerned that if she did stand up Abed would just switch songs on her anyway. But Britta duets with the dean, which has everyone in stitches, and Shirley brings down the house, so it’s not a waste of an outing.

Then, late one night when Annie’s trying to help Jeff grade papers, they get mysteriously locked in his office – but they just leave via the window, Jeff going first and helping Annie down on the other side. They get in his car, move to a crappy 24-hour diner, and grade over egg whites and chocolate chip pancakes instead.

And _every_ time the forecast calls for storms, Abed invents reasons for sending Annie over to Jeff’s apartment. The excuses are usually pretty thin, and all it takes is a quick, probing text to confirm that Jeff has no idea what’s going on. Thus Annie avoids getting snowed in at his place by never showing up there; Jeff does fall for an invite to their apartment, but when the weather gets bad, he just blithely walks home.

Jeff is confounded by each and every incident, and Annie plays along – maybe there was a point at which she could have admitted she knows what’s going on, but it’s much too late for that now. She is usually trying to subvert Abed’s machinations, but she’s also been trying to hide them from Jeff, which makes her something like an accessory, or like a contestant in the goofiest game of spy versus spy ever. 

If it wasn’t her two most important relationships on the line, she’d probably be having fun. As it is, she’s kind of starting to miss when she and Abed used to be uncomplicatedly on the same team, and the only one dreaming up romantic scenarios involving Jeff was her. It was so much easier when the fantasy stayed in her head, where it belonged.

But she is getting better at anticipating Abed’s moves and sidestepping them, and she doesn’t get overwhelmed with anxiety anymore when she suspects he might have something up his sleeve. He has escalated, certainly, but perhaps the simplest tropes really are the most effective; none of the high-concept ones gain any traction at all. And at any rate, Jeff remains as oblivious and unrufflable as ever. 

She thinks maybe nothing bad is going to happen, after all.

\---

She isn’t the one who finds him. This is both a source of comfort and of guilt – she’s relieved that she doesn’t have the image in her head, that she didn’t have to walk into Jeff’s office and see him slumped over, see the scotch, the pills, and realize that he was somewhere past ‘asleep’. She can’t stop picturing it, but it is imaginary, so maybe, if they make it through today, someday that picture will fade from memory. But then, if she had found him – if she’d dropped by to check on him, asked if he wanted to order takeout with her and Abed, stuck her head in the door just to say goodbye and that she’d see him tomorrow – if she’d gotten there _sooner_ , then maybe he would be awake by now.

She twists in her waiting room chair, trying to relieve a little of the strain in her back. Shirley reaches over and pats her hand, and Annie draws a shuddering breath in; Britta takes her opposite hand and squeezes, hard. Annie squeezes back.

She wants to have a plan, wants to do something, at least wants to have questions to ask that can get her closer to understanding, but she doesn’t understand anything and no matter what she says or does, she’s still going to have to wait. Abed asked a lot of questions when they first got there, asked doctors and nurses and passing orderlies, but nobody will tell them much. Britta is Jeff’s emergency contact, but none of them are family in any demonstrable way. “They’re getting him stable,” was repeated a few times, which sounded a lot like he _wasn’t_ stable. 

She doesn’t know how long they’ve been there, how long they’ve been waiting – and then a nurse stops in front of them and clears her throat. Annie sits up straight and accidentally crushes the life out of Britta’s hand she clenches it so hard; Abed, who had been standing motionless in a corner of the room, comes up behind her chair and hovers there. They probably make an odd picture, so unlike the easily recognizable groups scattered throughout the waiting room: the worried spouse, the overly-informed children of ailing parents, the high school girlfriend of some jock with a concussion. What do they look like? A group of random bystanders who saw an accident?

“You’re here for Mr. Winger?” the nurse says. They all nod. She announces, “They’ve moved him into a bed. There’s a two visitor at a time limit, and he’s not awake, but if you want to send a couple people to sit with him to wait, the rest of you can stay here, or take turns.”

“When will he wake up?” Annie asks. Her voice cracks. She doesn’t think she’s spoken since she got here. 

“I’m afraid you’ll have to ask a doctor.”

“The doctors won’t talk to us,” Shirley says, her voice full of reproach.

“He is going to wake up?” Abed says, and the flatness reads a little like a challenge.

“I can’t say,” the nurse says.

“Because you’re not allowed or you don’t know?” Annie says.

She doesn’t answer, just smiles in what is probably meant to be a reassuring way. 

Annie exchanges glances with the others; having to choose who gets to see Jeff and who doesn’t seems impossibly cruel. But then, at the same time, if _she_ doesn’t get to see him, she’ll raise holy hell, and she doesn’t particularly care what anyone else thinks or wants. 

“Annie and Shirley,” Britta says, quietly.

“What?” Annie says.

“You guys are good at that stuff. The whole calm and comforting, Florence Nightingale thing.”

“Oh, Britta,” Shirley says.

“It’s okay,” Britta says, visibly pulling herself together. “I’ll text people and update them on his condition.”

“I’ll see if I can find his doctor,” Abed offers.

“I’ll come switch out with you in a little while,” Shirley says.

Annie doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t even seen him yet; she’s not going to make any rash promises about leaving. She leans over and hugs Britta, looks back at Abed; he nods. She gets to her feet and follows the nurse down the hallway.

There’s an awful, jarring moment of dissonance, seeing him in a hospital bed – larger-than-life Jeff, who takes up more space in the room than any one other person ever could, who brought their family together on the sheer force of his personality alone. They used to wait for him to show up to start studying, even though Jeff was more liability than asset when it came to Spanish, because it didn’t feel like they could even be fully themselves unless he was there to spark them alive.

He's still, in the bed. There’s nothing of that spark visible in him, now, but there’s still some gravitational force which pulls her toward him. She crosses into the tiny, curtained-off area, pulls the chair as close to the bedside as it’ll go, and sits.

Behind her, Shirley is asking the nurse for a damp cloth so she can wash Jeff’s face, but Annie doesn’t look back, doesn’t say a word. She’s mesmerized by Jeff’s hand lying at the edge of the bed.

She reaches out and slips her fingers into his.

Activity swirls around her. They aren’t able to get any information out of Jeff’s doctors, but Abed does go around and ask every patient being held in the wider room if he can pretend to be visiting them so he can actually slip past the curtain to visit Jeff; enough people say yes that the whole Greendale group can squeeze in, even when Hickey comes by with coffees for all of them, even when Dean Pelton arrives bearing an exorbitantly large bouquet of flowers. Annie doesn’t give up her spot next to the bed, and she doesn’t let go of Jeff’s hand, but nobody comments on it. Britta lays claim to his other hand, Abed watches his vitals on the screen, and against all odds, Shirley keeps finding new ways to keep busy and be useful. She’s probably praying, as well. In the moment, it’s an oddly comforting thought. Somebody should be.

After a while, Britta asks, “Can he hear us?”

Annie lifts one shoulder and drops it again, without taking her eyes off Jeff’s face. 

“They can always hear you, in movies,” Abed puts in. But he sounds doubtful. Like maybe, this time, that all-encompassing worldview suddenly doesn’t apply. 

Annie shakes her head, as if she could dislodge all of this, shake off the nightmare and wake back up in the universe where Jeff hadn’t done this, would never, _ever_ do this. But though her vision starts to blur, the facts don’t change, no matter how little it makes sense. 

Jeff loves himself too much to do this. He loves stupid phone games too much, and cashmere, and scotch (no, not scotch), and the gym, and them. Surely, _surely_ , he loves them too much to have done this. 

A traitorous voice in her head that, on her worst days, sounds like her mother, hisses, _He didn’t love_ you _enough not to do this._

Shirley comes up and wraps her arms around her, and distantly she realizes that she’s crying, that everyone else is staring at her, but she doesn’t care. If he can hear her, then maybe he’ll realize that he can’t go. Maybe he’ll realize that she still needs him.

\---

He wakes up. There are half-assed explanations and strange apologies and hasty group hugs. Hickey goes home; Duncan comes by for a half hour and gives Jeff a talking-to with so much slang that no one really understands it. Jeff’s smiling, and joking, and evidently sincerely happy to see all of them, sincerely glad to be alive.

Annie stays at the back of the assembled crowd; it feels like if Jeff looks at her too closely he’s going to know that not an hour ago she was clutching his hand and weeping and begging him not to die. 

But visiting hours end, and the nurse shoos them out of the curtained area before he can notice anything.

And then there are decisions to be made.

“He’s being kept overnight for observation, and then he has a mandatory psych consult tomorrow morning,” the nurse tells them. “One person can stay in the room with him, the chairs push together into a bed – _one_ person,” she adds, with a suspicious glare over at Abed, who’s visiting amiably with the elderly man in the bed next to Jeff’s. 

Britta scoffs. “Yeah, ‘cause modern medicine has a vested interested in keeping its patients isolated, so they can’t advocate for themselves.” 

“Britta,” Shirley says repressively, and Annie tunes them out. She can still sort of see Jeff through the corner of the curtains and she can’t quite quash the nervous impulse to keep her eyes on him. He seems to be asleep already, which is counter-intuitive, given that he’s been unconscious for hours. It doesn’t seem like that should be tiring. Annie notices a pregnant lull in the conversation and wrenches herself back to attentiveness.

“Go home to the boys,” Britta is telling Shirley. The nurse is gone, to tend to another patient, or else maybe to escape them.

“And your cats need to be fed, don’t they?” Shirley answers kindly.

“Yeah,” Britta says, rubbing a hand over her face. “Somebody else could do it, in theory, but they do scratch.”

“I can stay,” Annie says, feeling selfish, but not selfish enough not to say it.

Britta and Shirley give her appraising looks.

“I have a _degree_ in _hospital management_ ,” she reminds them. “I know how places like this work, I can make sure he’s getting whatever he needs.”

“I don’t know, Annie,” Britta says. “I think you could use a little rest.”

“I can rest here,” she insists. “If I’m home in my own bed I’ll only stay up worrying about whatever’s happening.”

“Nothing’s happening,” Shirley says gently. “He’s asleep. There’s plenty of doctors and nurses. He doesn’t need you to be here.”

Annie takes a fortifying breath. “Unless somebody else wants to, I’m staying.” 

Britta lifts her hands in surrender. “Just take it up with Abed.” Annie nods; Shirley hugs her. Then they’re gone, and Abed is approaching her cautiously.

“One person can stay overnight,” she tells him, even though she thinks he was probably listening. He usually is.

“You can do whatever you want,” he says. “I’m not going to tell you you have to stay.” 

“What?" she says, half-startled. "I think Shirley and Britta were counting on you to tell me I have to go home.”

“I’m not going to tell you you have to do anything. You can come home if you want to, or you can stay with Jeff.”

“Why are you so hands-off all of a sudden?”

“It occurred to me that I did tell you I wouldn’t try and force this particular trope.”

She stares at him blankly for a moment, and then his words come back to her: _people are attracted to vulnerability and afraid of loss_. Of course. “This isn’t a romantic kind of sleepover, Abed,” she says. “He didn’t take a bullet for me.”

“I never said it was romantic. I said you can do whatever you want.”

She huffs a tired laugh. “Then all things being equal, I think I’d better stay.”

He peers at her, and asks, “Are you secretly hoping that someone else will volunteer?”

“No.”

“Is this one of those things where you have to say you want to stay to be polite but I’m supposed to not take no for an answer?

“No.”

“Is it tied to a feeling of guilt?”

“ _No_ ,” she lies. Her guilt is irrational and doesn’t need to be validated by becoming a subject of general discussion. “I’m not staying because I think I should or I think it’ll work out for me somehow. I want to stay. The hospital is letting me stay. So I’m staying.”

He considers this, and finally nods. “Do you want me to bring you anything?”

“No, thanks. The hospital can probably get me a pillow and blanket.”

He cocks his head at her. “You can’t sleep without all your own stuff.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s just the one night.”

“How will you get home?”

“I don’t know, Abed, I’m just going to go to sleep and I’ll figure it out in the morning!”

“Okay.” Still, he hovers. She stares at him. He stares back. She throws up her hands, and Abed misinterprets the gesture and steps in to hug her. She heaves a sigh and passively lets him, which gets awkward quickly because Abed is too stiff and skinny to be a very good hugger, so she gives up and hugs him back.

It helps.

A nicer nurse comes along and helps her push together the chairs to make a cot, and gives her a flat pillow and a blanket from out of a closet. Annie whispers her thanks, arranges her makeshift bed, and lies down to stare at the ceiling. 

The lights in the room go down to a slightly less glaring level of brightness when it hits 8p.m, but it’s still not dark, and in the background there’s the underlying, unceasing noise of a hospital being managed. Jeff is sleeping soundly, so she self-consciously tries not to fidget, since every move she makes produces a squeak from the plastic underneath her. She times the various beeps coming from Jeff’s machines, and theorizes about what they are, and wishes that she’d majored in pre-med or nursing, and eventually, finally, succumbs to sleep, lulled by the reliable regularity of Jeff’s breathing.

She’s so attuned to all the sounds of the room that she awakens exactly when Jeff does – she hears the hospital bed creak followed by the protesting beep of a machine, and immediately she’s alert. She jolts up and takes a breath to yell for a nurse, but he’s just sitting up, tangled in wires and tubes and blankets, looking disoriented, like he thrashed himself awake in a nightmare. It’s still dim, and the room and hall outside are quiet. “It’s okay,” she says. 

His head snaps around and he stares at her. “Annie?”

“It’s okay,” she repeats, “you’re in the hospital.” 

“I know I’m in the hospital,” he says. “Why are you here?” His voice rasps, so she gets up and fills him a plastic cup with water from the pitcher next to his bed instead of answering. He takes a sip, coughs, takes another sip, and clears his throat. “Thanks,” he says.

He still sounds terrible. “Yeah.”

“Won’t Abed do something weird to the apartment if you leave him there alone all night?”

“Maybe. But he won’t go in my room.” She takes the cup from him and sets it back on the table, then sinks back onto her pseudo-bed. 

“Is that where you’re sleeping?” he asks.

“Can you honestly tell me your bed right now is much better?”

He makes a face. “You could be home, though.”

“You should try to go back to sleep, Jeff.”

“It’s no good,” he says amiably. “I’m awake now, and you wanted to sit up with me, so now you’re gonna have to entertain me.”

She shoots him an aggrieved look.

“Come on, Annie,” he says, suddenly serious. “Since when are you this quiet?”

“I don’t know, maybe since it’s the middle of the night?”

“You’ve been quiet all day, all – ever since I woke up.”

“Jeff. Please go to sleep.”

“No.” His eyes are locked on hers. He says almost flatly, “I’m sorry.”

“Jeff –”

“I know I shouldn’t have lied to any of you, but lying to you was probably the worst. And, just –” He cuts off, frustrated, then says, “I know that. You don’t have to say anything.” 

She ducks her head, pretends to be arranging her scratchy blanket, and takes a deep breath. She doesn’t want to do this now. She doesn’t know if she can do this now – she’s barely holding onto her composure, but not in the same overwhelming way as usual. She doesn’t feel like she’s going to explode, lose control. She feels brittle. Like she could break. Her heart is beating hard in her chest and every time she hears a machine beep she thinks _He’s not dead, but he could have been, he could have been, he could have been_. “I don’t care,” she says, “that you lied to us about how old you are. I _care_ that you drank a fifth of scotch and took a bottle of sketchy pills.” And damn it all, she’s crying again, the tears streaming down her face like they’re never going to stop this time, because he’s alive and still everything feels broken, like she needs to put it all back together, but she doesn’t know how and she can’t stop shaking.

“Annie, please.” He makes an abortive move towards her which is thwarted by various wires and the fact that he’s in a hospital gown. “It was an accident, I told you.”

She reaches up to wipe haphazardly at her face. “Yeah, but you knew better and yet somehow you ended up here anyway.” 

“You don’t understand.”

“The _only_ reason I don’t understand is because you haven’t told me,” she shoots back. “Because whatever this was, you bottled it up like you do with everything and you let it poison you almost to death, and you’re _still_ doing it now.”

He lets out a long breath, and when he speaks, his voice is heavy. “Annie, I’m working an interim part-time job I’m not even qualified for and I don’t really care about, at a dead-end institution that probably won’t survive the year. I live alone in a crappy apartment, I still can barely bring myself to speak to my father, and if anything happens to my mom I don’t know if I’m going to be able to support her. I have nothing and nobody to show for the last twenty years.”

She chokes on a laugh that is almost a sob. Every long-ingrained fear in her soul is screaming at her that it’s her neediness that drives him away, that she can’t ask him to stay for her, that she’s pitiful and grasping and she will never be able to make him stay. “Are we not enough for you?” she asks anyway. “Are we nothing?”

“ _Annie_ ,” he says. “God, no.”

“You don’t have to love Greendale,” she says, fighting past the tremble in her voice and all the voices in her head. “I know it’s being held together by duct tape and lawsuits settled out of court and fraud teachers that haven’t been found out yet. But the group, Shirley and Abed and Britta and – me. Aren’t we something? I’m not saying that we have to be your sole reason for living, or anything. But –”

“You’re _more_ than enough,” Jeff interrupts forcefully. “That’s the problem, Annie. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me, the only bright spot in the whole awful trajectory of my life.” He sighs. “And you’re too good for me. And I can lose you a lot easier than I ever found you, the second you realize that.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We sat in this miserable hospital for you with hours. Even when they wouldn’t tell us anything, even when they wouldn’t let us see you.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, we _did_.” She pushes herself to her feet, and crosses the tiny room to stand next to his bed. Automatically, because she’s been clutching somebody’s hand all day, she takes his hand. Warily, he lets her. “We had to because we are your family, and that’s what family does,” she says. “If you’d show up for us, then you have to believe that we’ll show up for you. It’s not an obligation, it’s an inevitability. If you’re in trouble, that’s where we’re going to be, every time.”

His grip on her hand tightens, and the look in his eyes is either terror or heartbreak. “You deserve better.”

“Alright,” she says, shakily. “So don’t ever put us through this again.” She manages a watery smile to take away some of the harshness of the words, and reaches up with her free hand to swipe again at her tears. She says more lightly, “So how about this. I promise that we won’t abandon you. And you promise that you won’t push us away.”

He smiles back, sadly. “I promise.”

\---

She knows better than to think that everything is going to be magically better, that Jeff is just going to take her at her word, all his fears vanished.

But for a few, blissful weeks, everything does go back to normal, at least. Everyone’s focusing on final papers and exams, Abed is letting the high dose of fear-and-vulnerability sink in, and the last few items on the Save Greendale checklist are getting finished off.

Then Jeff proposes to Britta. Apparently. And there’s not even a moment to pause and take in the insanity of that, because they’re all caught up in a race against both time and Subway.

And the spontaneous engagement falls apart, of course it does, but somehow, unfairly, it still feels like it was a betrayal. If Jeff was so afraid, if he needed to spin off, if he needed something or someone to hold onto, then why didn’t he ask – but no. 

Abed abruptly becomes a significantly less micromanaging showrunner, electing in light of everything to give her some space, which feels both like a kindness and a bit like a slap in the face. She doesn’t want to be constantly confronted with potentially romantic situations which will either fly past her without landing, or else blow up in her face. But she also doesn’t particularly want the extra proof that the narrative, such as it is, really isn’t going her way. Abed’s tenacity is infamous; if he’s given up, it can only be because the situation is totally hopeless.

She retreats for the summer. She cleans the apartment top-to-bottom, then gets really into pickling for a few weeks, then finds two new organizations to volunteer with. She considers renewing her dating efforts, but rejects the idea as certainly motivated more by spite than by genuine openness to new connections. She dives into a movie marathon with Abed, instead.

She’s determined not to get pulled back into the delusion. Their sixth year, she is going to be carefree and unruffled and she’s not going to have romantic potential with _anyone_ , A-couple or B-couple.

And yet, barely a week into the new semester, the ladders professor falls on top of her, and Abed promptly rushes off to find Jeff rather than calling 9-1-1. “What’d you do that for?” she complains later, when she’s finally back in the apartment, stiff, on pain-killers, and dreading the answer. “Jeff’s terrible at medical stuff.”

Abed hands her the cup of tea he made her and looks uncomfortable. “I thought maybe the reverse hurt-slash-comfort dynamic would put you back on track.”

She groans. “Please tell me we’re not starting that again, Abed, I can’t take it. This time I _really_ mean it.” 

Abed sits on the edge of her bed. “I don’t get it,” he says, sounding troubled. “He was so close.”

“No, he wasn’t. Whatever you, or I, may have thought Jeff was close to – I don’t know, overcoming his allergy to relationships, getting some character development – his head was obviously someplace very different.”

“The signs were all there, though,” Abed insists. “There’s no narrative reason that things should have stalled like that. I was only building on the tropes that were already there.”

Annie sighs. “Maybe,” she says carefully, “what Jeff and I are to each other just doesn’t fit neatly into the romantic tropes like that.”

“But what else could it be?”

“I don’t think it fits any of the usual types.”

Abed gives her a look. “Is this one of those _you have to learn to think outside those limiting categories_ conversations?”

“No, not really,” Annie assures him. “I think the categories are helpful, and really clear, and probably true, usually. Just not for us.” She reaches over to bat his bony knee with her fingertips. “Look at you and me. When we first met, you thought we were Chandler and Phoebe, the people in the group who have all the same friends but never have storylines together. And then we found out we’re not. But we’re not anything else, obviously, either. We’re not the strong female character heroine and the token friend-zoned male; we’re not the roommates who are secretly in love with each other; I’m not your sidekick like that girl from Monk or any of the Inspector Spacetime humans. We’re just – Annie and Abed. Something totally innovative.”

Abed looks skeptical. “And you and Jeff?”

She chews on her lip thoughtfully. “What Jeff and I have…maybe _sometimes_ it imitates the typical romantic leads trajectory. But it just – it is what it is. And we’re so deep in those grooves that no matter how much the circumstances around us try to guide us in another direction, we never get outside of our own patterns. Maybe we’re already something so big that there’s no room for it to grow - so heavy that it can’t be pushed into becoming something else. Maybe he takes up too much of my life already to take on another role in it.”

Abed gives her a penetrating look. Then he shakes his head. “That sounds like a cop-out.”

She’s startled into laughing. “Seriously?”

“Yeah,” he says, with no hint of remorse. “We’re all important to each other. But the difference is, you and I are happy with our relationship. But you and Jeff aren’t. Whatever you are now, it isn’t enough for you.”

And he’s not wrong. This thing with Jeff has always felt like it was teetering on the edge of something _else_ , something that they weren’t, not yet. It was never a relationship comfortable in stasis, it was always pushing to consume everything – her _whole_ heart, her _whole_ life, her _whole_ future. 

But that was only an illusion.

Annie takes a deep breath. “I think it’s going to have to be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really, really hate the “G.I. Jeff” episode. I hate its flippancy, I hate its rushed resolution, and I hate how nothing’s really resolved because the age thing comes back with a vengeance in season 6. I wrote this chapter in the hopes of fixing the episode – or at least lending it a little dignity. But I think I mostly came to the conclusion that it’s unfixable (or at least that I am not capable of fixing it). Ah well. It was an experiment.
> 
> Thanks for being patient with me while I figured this out!! And thanks for your comments, I love them!


	6. MISCOMMUNICATION

_and if you wanted me, you really should've showed_

_One year later._

Annie doesn’t exactly miss Greendale whenever she’s away – hard to miss the incompetence, let alone the ever-present funky smell – but coming back is hard. Even over the length of a summer, it always seems to have moved on without her in some intangible way, and a part of her wants too badly for the school to need her to be comfortable with that. Every time she runs into a student worker who doesn’t recognize her on sight, every time she goes to order her usual at the caf or the coffee kiosk only to find it’s been written off the menu, she experiences a wrenching feeling, a premonition of all the little things she’s going to have to let go. 

It’s worse now that she was in Virginia over the summer instead of just downtown, harder to readjust – she’s standing at the edge of the parking lot with her hands in her pockets, eyeing the campus suspiciously, and psyching herself up to dive back in. She only has a few credits left, is already set to intern at the local police department and might look for additional work besides, so it won’t be the same, anyway, won’t be a home so much as – well, so much as a community college. She’s no less fond of it, but perhaps she’s less afraid of everything outside of it.

“You’re back.”

Her revery broken, she looks behind her, and sees Jeff, who’s looking at her as if she’s a mirage. “Of course I’m back,” she says, with an effort at lightness, “it was a _summer_ internship, Jeff.”

“I know,” he says, in a way that sounds like deep down he really didn’t know at all.

She looks at him, takes an unsteady breath, and reminds herself that everything between them is still what it’s always been. One more entry on the short list of kisses doesn’t really change anything; one more sideways confession of something unspecified doesn’t push them past the point of no return. She asks, “Do you have a class?”

“Not for another hour.”

She raises her eyebrows, impressed despite herself. “And yet you’re here?”

“I see what you’re implying about my work ethic, and I take umbrage.”

“And here I thought you’d be flattered.”

He grins, and some of the awkwardness hanging between them dissipates. “When’s your class?”

“Not ‘til tomorrow,” she says. “I’m only acclimatizing myself.”

He nods, as if it makes perfect sense that their school requires an adjustment period akin to that for jetlag, if the zones were made up of bizarreness instead of time. “Want to get coffee and I’ll walk with you?”

“I hardly think I need a tour guide, Jeff.”

“No, of course not,” he says. “I’m offering to protect you from disrespectful freshmen.”

She smiles. “In that case, I accept.”

The coffee at Shirley’s Sandwiches is world’s better than the old stuff from Hot & Brown, less full of grounds than when Britta was the one making it, and also more unassuming than any coffee she was able to find in Virginia, which always seemed like it was judging her for her inability to discern undertones of citrus and notes of hipsterism. Annie and Jeff walk side by side through the halls, keeping a lazy pace and keeping the reminiscences to a minimum. He asks about her summer, which was busy and humid and exhausting; she asks about everything she missed, which seems to have been mostly a lot of hanging around the bar. They talk about Abed, who’s been sending the group an extremely detailed weekly report via email, and seems to be flourishing, and Troy, whose radio silence finally broke with a phone call to Jeff about a month ago, looking for legal help to get ahold of some funds so he can fly back to the states. The far-flung members of the group are already scrambling to arrange travel so they can be present for the big homecoming.

At last, they find themselves standing in the library outside Study Room F. They exchange glances. Jeff smiles wryly, Annie fiddles with her hair.

“Shall we?” says Jeff.

“I guess we may as well,” she answers.

He opens the door and gestures her in, and the inevitable montage of flashbacks starts. Big moments run together with all the small, everyday interactions that were so taken for granted – in a way, it’s the little things that she’s missed the most, that she’s been missing for years now. It’s been so much longer than three months since she knew where she stood with him.

She clears her throat, and says tentatively, “Jeff?” 

“Yeah?” he says, pulling out the chair in his regular spot and dropping into it with all the same calculated carelessness from when she first met him. The phone comes out of his pocket, of course, but then he just glances at it cursorily and sets it down.

She doesn’t want to sit, doesn’t want the habits of this room and this relationship to force her into the same old grooves, not today. She stands in the middle of the room, fights off the feeling that she’s giving a presentation or being interviewed or about to face the firing squad, and asks, “Are we good?” 

He looks up at her in surprise, then says firmly, “We’re fine.”

“Okay, you say that,” she says, “but I don’t want this year to be one of those years where we don’t seem to speak to each other for weeks at a time, and then everything blows up. If there’s something we need to address, or expectations we need to set, we should do that now.”

“Annie,” Jeff says, lifting up a hand to stop her, “things with us are really okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Because last year –”

“I know,” he says. “Things were…strained.”

“I don’t want us to be like that.”

“We won’t be,” he assures her. “Unless –”

“Unless what?”

“Are _you_ good? With me?”

“Jeff –”

“Because it’s okay if you’re not.” 

“No, I’m good.”

“You are?”

“Yeah.”

He huffs an awkward laugh; she shifts her weight from one foot to another, ducks her head, and looks ruefully up at him through her eyelashes.

“It’s just –” she starts.

“Yeah?” he says, too quickly.

“No. I mean, everything from last year…it was only like that because of…” She trails off; Jeff looks at her expectantly. “Everything that happened before,” she finishes in a small voice.

“You mean what happened year five.” Jeff says.

She almost chokes on her fortifying sip of coffee, which gives her time to bite back the automatic demand of “ _You knew?!_ ”, which would only be obvious, unhelpful, and embarrassing. “Wait,” she says instead, once she’s stopped coughing, “are we going to – to _talk_ about that?”

“I thought you wanted to address things left un-addressed?” he says drily. She can only stammer. Jeff shifts in his chair to face her, and says reasonably, “Okay, the whole thing was far from ideal. The circumstances were crazy.”

Annie squirms, and admits, “It _was_ a very strange way to be forced to acknowledge your feelings.”

Jeff snorts. “I’ll say.”

“I guess I just never thought it was going to _work_.”

“Neither did I.”

“And then when it did, I didn’t know how to deal with that.”

“You mean, having a robot tell you you’re in love?”

Annie sighs. “I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that, he’s not a computer or a robot.”

“What?” Jeff says blankly.

“Abed!”

“Who said anything about Abed?” Jeff says, bewildered. “I’m talking about –”

“Year five, Abed orchestrating scenarios to force us together?” Annie fills in helpfully, at the same time that Jeff finishes, “the robot in the school basement opening the door when I looked at you.” 

She stares at him. “ _What_?”

“Whoa, what?” Jeff says. “Say that again?”

“All year long Abed was scheming to put us in tropey romantic situations, he thought it would help the narrative if we got together,” she explains in a rush. “What was the thing you said?”

But Jeff doesn’t hear her; he’s staring blankly as all the pieces fall into place. “Is _that_ why he kept trying to pitch improbable road trips?” 

Annie sighs. “Yeah, and I was glad nobody ever went for it, because I’m sure I would have had to book an extra hotel room so we didn’t _mysteriously_ get stuck with just one bed.” She rolls her eyes.

“How long have you known?” Jeff says, more shocked than accusative. 

“Oh, the whole time.”

“Why didn’t you _tell_ me?!”

“Oh yeah,” she says sarcastically, “it’s _my_ lack of communication that’s the problem here. What exactly was that about Borchert’s robot?”

He sobers. “Just that, really. I looked at you, and the door opened.”

She stares at him, and tries to rewind their earlier conversation in her head. “And you took that for a robot telling you you were in love?”

“I thought you knew.” 

“Jeff!” she says. “How would I have known?” He shrugs uncomfortably. “Wait,” she says, “you mean things were strained because you thought you loved me for all of last year? And you thought I knew?”

He looks at her head on, and says, “I do love you.”

She wants to be serious, wants to hold herself back and hold him accountable and make sure she understands before she gives anything away, but she finds herself smiling, involuntarily. He’s never said it before, and she knows it’s just words – but also, it isn’t, because if he can finally say it, then something that was twisted up in his heart must have come loose. Maybe, for the first time, Jeff’s free. “Why didn’t you do anything?” she asks.

“Because,” he answers seriously, “I thought you’d be happier without me.”

“ _Jeff_ ,” she says.

He only shakes his head. “You didn’t stop Abed from playing matchmaker,” he says. It’s not an accusation, but not quite a question either.

“No,” she says.

“Why?”

She shrugs helplessly. “I thought I’d be happier with you.” He blinks, and she goes on shakily, “And I guess, I thought you might be happier with me.”

He stares at her – Jeff Winger, literally speechless – and the gravity that’s been pulling her towards him all this time takes hold, and she thinks, just maybe, she knows where it’s taking her. She walks slowly, feeling self-conscious and awkward and reckless, and sits in the chair next to Jeff, the one that’s always been empty. 

She says, “What do we do now?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter six stretched itself into two chapters, so there's one installment still to come! 
> 
> Thanks for reading, and thanks for all your comments! You guys are such a tremendously generous fandom!!


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